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Apple announces Apple Card credit card

theverge.com

641–650 of 778 posts

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see what sure looks a mag stripe at 2m58s in the video at https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/25/18277417/apple-pay-credit... Disappointing.

Though very few and far between at this point, I'd say there are still a few times a year when I explicitly need to swipe a magstripe on my credit card - most recently a rural gas station in the California desert where I was seriously dependent on being able to fill up a tank. I think many people, myself included, would still consider a credit card without the option to fall back to magstripe a nonstarter for their p…

my local Sees Candies don't have a chip reader and only accept swipes for some reason

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA, yes most folks pay around 3%, but it gets lower when the card is physically present, aka swiped. Now the EU has limited the Interchange Fee paid by EU merchants by an order of magnitude: >For card payments carried out by the cardholder in a shop ("Card Present Transactions"): > 0.2% of the value of the transaction for debit cards; > 0.3% of the value of the transaction for credit cards: >For online paymen…

And yet there are cards that offer 1 or 2% cashback in the UK - are these simply funded by the banks as a way to tempt users to sign up?

if they're banking on a large percentage being online transactions, then the 1% could be covered or exceeded. Additionally, if they even break even on `transaction fees - cash back` then they make money on interest whenever someone can't/doesn't pay in full every month

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#643
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally true. This is why I got excited for Apple TV+ for a minute. A single interface to access to all of these services is totally worth my money. I often thought about building something like this, but always came to the conclusion that the potential legal problems are not worth it. justwatch.com is a life saver when it comes to figure out where to get the content from. +1 for justwatch.com!

> This is why I got excited for Apple TV+ for a minute. A single interface to access to all of these services is totally worth my money. No way Disney and Netflix and Amazon Prime will give their programming to Apple.

They already do. Apple TV app happily shows me Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc etc content for me to watch. Their suggestions on things to watch also include content only accessible from those services. My Netflix and Hulu (and HBO and others) are even billed to me via iTunes too, so this isn’t a huge shift in reality. Almost everything but the more polished UI (and not needing to wait on the provider’s app to load, looking at you Hulu with your terribly slow app) is available today in fact.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] ability to use the card to finance items you can't afford to pay in full right now. Given the rates charged by many cards, I'm not sure you'd want to do that. The US has an average of 15%: * https://www.creditkarma.com/credit-cards/i/average-apr-on-cr... * https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-interest-ra...

I've done it before. Never for truly big ticket items, but sometimes the $5 or whatever in interest to carry a small balance for a month isn't worth the extra effort it would take to free up the cash I'd need to pay it off in full without dipping below the minimum balance I like to keep in my checking account, and it's also not worth $5 to me to wait another month before replacing that busted transmission.

> I've done it before.

It depends on the matter of scale. Some folks either don't understand how things work, or are just bad at math. That's where the problems start for people.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look no further than the recent issue where Patreon competitor Subscribestar had payment processors Stripe and PayPal stop processing their payments for _political_ disagreements with the purported beneficiaries of the donations through the platform. PayPal said that it was actually one of the underlying payment processors, and it was suspected to be MasterCard. That incident was the first time I've ever taken the ne…

SubscribeStar was composed almost entirely of people banned from Patreon for various reasons, including things like dropping n-bombs in videos and blocking search-and-rescue boats from saving migrants in the Mediterranean. It's not surprising that big, mainstream companies don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole. Patreon has also banned various leftist sites for things like doxxing and posting instructions on h…

Sargon of Akkad told a group of white neo-nazis they were a bunch of "n-words," ironically, in the context of accusing them of having the same poor behavior they attempt to associate with black people. If you're familiar with the entire rest of his body of work, he is a vehement liberal in opposition of any such identity politics. He said this on somebody else's channel, not only off of Patreon, but off of his YouTube account altogether.

But all that being said, it's all irrelevant. Let's say he said the n-word maliciously and was a racist, is it the role of MasterCard to prevent that person from being able to pay for a burrito? To get a paycheck from their legal employment? Why can't the expectation be that MasterCard is neutral up until the point of legality? There is a really bad authoritarian trend on the left wing to go after absolutely every neutral cog in the machine. If Reddit doesn't ban /r/The_Donald, Reddit is right wing. If Twitter doesn't ban TERFs, Twitter is right wing. Now payments? Are we going to get mad at the government for letting Been Shapiro drive on their neutral roads?

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#646
Commenting on the video of the event in 7 minutes:

1. Apple News was announced again? I think it was already released wasn't it? Still not interested though. No matter how much "AI" they use to make recommendations.

2. Being forced to have an iPhone to have a credit card that seems like any other card sounds like a terrible idea. Plus where I live we already have multiple apps and services that allows me to create an infinite amount of cards and transfer money with zero fees.

3. The single game subscription seems interesting, specially the part where they say they can also be played offline. I wonder how they do that. I don't play games anymore, still, interesting, wouldn't mind trying it.

4. tv.channels looks like other similar services, and they seem to imply you can only use their app on smart TVs and their devices, which is a big no-no. Still, if with good shows and price competitive...

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#647

I don't thing it is healthy to have big entities like this control fundamental services like payment processing. How long before the opaque governance of the App Store is applied to their payments offering? How long before activists start making this a new vector for deplatforming? Apple also announced a news offering ( https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-news-plus ) and I think the same concerns apply there.

Look no further than the recent issue where Patreon competitor Subscribestar had payment processors Stripe and PayPal stop processing their payments for _political_ disagreements with the purported beneficiaries of the donations through the platform. PayPal said that it was actually one of the underlying payment processors, and it was suspected to be MasterCard. That incident was the first time I've ever taken the ne…

This is good for bitcoin.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA, yes most folks pay around 3%, but it gets lower when the card is physically present, aka swiped. Now the EU has limited the Interchange Fee paid by EU merchants by an order of magnitude: >For card payments carried out by the cardholder in a shop ("Card Present Transactions"): > 0.2% of the value of the transaction for debit cards; > 0.3% of the value of the transaction for credit cards: >For online paymen…

And yet there are cards that offer 1 or 2% cashback in the UK - are these simply funded by the banks as a way to tempt users to sign up?

Most people miss the point that for a rewards card to pay you. You have to pay off the balance every month. And missing that by even a single month at 10%-21% interest that you get charged. You are more then likely to loose money even with the rewards.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#649
In terms of just rewards, is this card competitive with current offerings?

3% on Apple products is great. However, I only buy a new product once every half, minus Apple TV subscription.

The 2% cashback is only on purchases made through Apple Pay. I already carry the Citi Double Cash card, which does this.

Re: Apple announces Apple Card credit card

#650
post #131

It seems to me that Apple can offer reduced fees due to the fact that they'll have less fraud as a result of requiring touch/face ID for every purchase. While interesting, it doesn't come close to solving what I feel is the largest problem with cards in the US today -- interchange fees.

I know this is a MasterCard, but it'd be more interesting if they were able to take out the $0.35 transaction fee on every transaction. This is the bread and butter of every payment processor, and it's complete rent seeking, AND supposedly all the major processors are going to RAISE it at roughly the same time in the coming months. Eliminating the set transaction fee could open up so many potential businesses. But I'…

Doesn't Square already do that?

https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square...

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